“But even that side of Kitt obscured the Kitt who was passionately devoted to and supported peace and civil rights causes. The clash with Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson at the celebrity women’s luncheon in January 1968 gave the first public hint of that.”

*

William Calvin, author of Global Fever, attempting to answer John Brockman’s question, “What will change everything?”:

Climate will change our worldview. That each of us will die someday ranks up there with 2+2=4 as one of the great certainties of all time. But we are accustomed to think of our civilization as perpetual, despite all of the history and prehistory that tells us that societies are fragile. The junior-sized slices of society such as the church or the corporation, also assumed to outlive the participant, provide us with everyday reminders of bankruptcy. Climate change is starting to provide daily reminders, challenging us to devise ways to build in resiliency, an ability to bounce back when hit hard.

*

In That Shakespeherian Rag, Steven W Beattie posts about the results of a survey which concludes that, “Almost half of Canadians could not name a single Canadian author unprompted.”
But I seriously wonder if the results would differ significantly in any other country. What do you think? Do you live in a stimulating literary culture?

*

The top 100 books of all time, alphabetically by author, as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided.

*

The Telegraph reports on a man whose home was full of rubbish which he navigated through an intricate network of tunnels. He died after losing his way in the labyrinth. Police called in a specialist team – equipped with breathing apparatus – to search the two-storey house. They discovered a confusing system of tunnels networking around the interior of the building, with Mr Stewart lying dead inside.

With thanks to A Little Red Blog

*

The Guardian has a piece from Richard Price on his old tutor, Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road:

We were in our early 20s, and most of us had neither read nor even heard of him. In class he called you by your last name, no title: a brusque, slightly boarding-schoolish and utterly seductive form of address. He regularly and passionately savaged those writers whom he perceived to be his more validated (“lucky”, he called them) peers, but he treated a student’s work, no matter how hapless, with shocking earnestness.

He was a nurturer of grudges; an incubator of slights.

His personal gods were Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

He was bitter.

He had every right to be bitter.

He was really bitter.

*

Chris Bowers at Undernews doesn’t see much hope or change on the horizon:

Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Also, why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely. Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration.

*

Jonathan Dozier-Ezell speculates on writing and publishing:

It’s now easier than ever to get your ideas and content out to readers with or without help from publishing channels. Now there are writers who only write to see their names on a pulpy spine (and they will be disappointed), but on the whole, writers, authors, poets, etc. simply want to be heard. Being paid is nice, but it really isn’t the priority.

*

Robert Fisk in the UK’s Independent:

General Roberts of Kandahar (told) the British in 1880 that “we have nothing to fear from Afghanistan, and the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself. . . I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us”.

*

Love Thy Belly:

The record label Roadrunner has been getting some serious online bellyache from fans of one of its artists, Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, after she reported on her blog that she had been asked to cut shots from the video for her solo song Leeds United because “they thought I looked fat”.

Telling the story helped her to shed the life.

Because life is about change, about being adaptable, about the search for new forms. Death is about getting stuck in a form that is beyond metamorphosis – about a form that has become sclerotic and in which we are incapacitated.

In artistic life the search is the same, for new forms. The novel, like all other artistic endeavours, only survives because of its adaptability.

And perhaps it’s the same with Theastuene, it wasn’t originally as it is today, the slates on the roof are new; back in its first incarnation the roof was of sod, the glass panes in the windows certainly not double-glazed. And the white paint which preserves the boards today, although it was available in Thea’s day, would not have been used as it was extremely expensive. The house timbers would have been impregnated with pine tar and linseed oil, giving it the colour of honey and the aroma of an evergreen forest.

If it had always been like it is today, we wouldn’t have a story about it, or about Thea herself. We wouldn’t have been able to say, Once upon a time, in spring 1864, or thereabouts, Thea Pedersdatter was kneading sourdough on the kitchen table when there was a commotion on the path outside the window.
. . . . . . . . . . to be continued

In a very competitive culture that emphasizes newness and fashion, and promotes the reading of a current blockbuster which is forgotten in a moment’s time, the backlist is a vanishing phenomenon. The volume of sales of one-year-old or older books is shrinking, while newer books capture an increasing share of the market. Most major publishers realize that this ratio has changed. The scope of the decrease is estimated to be 20 percent: the backlist which once accounted for 60 percent to 70 percent of the sales volume now represents 40 percent to 50 percent, depending on the size and age of the publisher.

Does a story’s power and resonance come from the author, as if in a vacuum? Or does it come from the relationship between the story and the reader? And if a writer works in an area to which he knows the reader brings baggage, isn’t it wise to use that baggage to his own advantage? I thought this is what I was doing, playing with the reader’s expectations and having fun by subverting them. But Abbot’s reader disagreed, saying I was bringing a very specific audience to the story – and then doing precisely the thing that would most efficiently bore and disappoint it.

Well, yes, usually.

But it’s sometimes funny as well.

Yesterday’s article in The Times by Tim Reid and Tom Baldwin from New Hampshire, reported on a Democratic debate on Saturday where the rivals fell into arguing which one of them represented real change. John Edwards joined forces with Barack Obama, asserting that, unlike the former First Lady, both he and Obama were “agents of change”.

Hillary Clinton responded angrily, in the most heated moment of the night. “I want to make change, but I’ve already made change. I will continue to make change. I’m not just running on a promise of change. I’m running on 35 years of change.”

Earlier in the day, Bill Clinton, working non-stop to save his wife’s campaign, told a crowd in a school gymnasium in Amherst: “She’s a change-maker, the best I ever saw.”

Hey, you got to smile.

It’s in Norwegian with sub-titles in both Danish and English.

But go take a look. It must have been hell for early-adopters back in those days of rapid change.

It is interesting to note that Miller decided to use a new translation of the play, which is the result of a collaboration between Tania Alexander and Pam Gems.

In Chekhov’s play, Madame Ranevskya returns from Paris as the family estate, including her beloved cherry orchard, is about to be sold to pay for mounting debts. Revelling in past glories and their extravagant lifestyle, the family ignore all offers of help. In deep denial, they refuse to see the inevitability of change.

Joanna Lumley is warm and radiant as Madame Ranevskaya, a performance it will not be easy to forget. But there are others in the cast who are not daunted by the star actress and who give stirring performances of their own.

Tom Mannion as Lopakhin, the peasant who has risen far above his station, is completely convincing. His warmth of feeling for Ranevskaya shines through his words and actions, and he is the only one who can actually offer the family some kind of hope. But when his offer of help is ignored he falls back on the hard-headed, realist solution to which he owes his material progress in the world.

Hugh Sachs is hilarious in his depiction of the lovelorn, accident-prone Yepichodov, who is droll throughout his phases of misfortune and failing luck.

Timothy Bateson is both funny and touching as the butler, Firs, though he does mistime his entrance in the final scene of the play, something that Jonathan Miller might have helped him avoid.

Tobias Menzies as the perpetual student, Trofimov, is like a cat, stalking the expanses of the stage, reaching deep within himself for answers to age-old riddles.

But the cast, including Lumley, come together in an ensemble that is merely delightful. We feel that they not only inhabit their own characters, but they respond to each other as they would if we were witnessing a slice of real historical documentary.

I played Firs in a production of The Cherry Orchard in 1977, and in the intervening thirty years I have never knowingly missed a production. I must have seen twenty different interpretations of the play, and I can say, absolutely, that the one currently on stage at The Crucible is the best.

This magnificent production continues in Sheffield until the 7th April.